Quotes About Writing

I'd like to meet fewer people who say 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 10 pages I've written,' and more 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 300 pages I've written.'

I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.

I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.

Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.

There are writers, and I know some of them, who are very disciplined. Who write, like, four pages a day, every day. And it doesn't matter if their dog got run over by a car that day, or they won the Irish sweepstakes. I'm not one of those writers.

Once, I thought I had a novel, and it turned out it was only a short story. I wrote about 800 pages, but it ended up being a short story. And if it ever happens to me again, I Will Go Insane.

If I've written five pages by hand, out of those five pages, one page might be worth saving. The rest is crap. I have to throw it away. It's like I need eight hours to do two hours' work.

I wanted to be a writer, but the idea of writing novels or movies seemed really intimidating. I never got more than a few pages into one.

I've sat down and written with a more or less supportable or insupportable idea or thing to say, and it ends. When it's not 200 pages, people want to call it a story. I guess they're entitled to do that. In my view, if it were a supportable idea, it would have gone 200 pages, and it didn't.

Most shows are normally 40 or 50 pages.

It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it.

I can only write about two or three pages of fiction a day.

Anyone can sit down and write two pages of a novel, then forget about it, and a week later write five pages of a screenplay, then forget about it, and a week later start another novel... etc, etc.

Inspiration is easy. The hard part is getting the inspiration onto 300 pages in an interesting, cohesive, easy-to-read but hard-to-forget story.

When I'm working on a book, I try to do eight pages a week. That seems like a good amount. Less than that, I'm not getting a nice momentum, and more than that, I'm probably putting out too much crap.

I was doing some research on menstruation for a column. I read about Arunachalam Muruganantham's life and work, and his story gripped me, and that is when I sat down, wrote the first few pages, and sent them off to my editor to have a look.

With television, sometimes the writing is continuous and happening at every moment, and you'll get new pages at the last moment. We have to incorporate that into what it is that we're doing.

Usually, when I write a novel, it takes me about 100 pages to figure out the voice of the narrator.

It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.

When I write, I see the pages in my head, not the words.

To distract myself from writing, I was singing Bob Dylan's 'My Back Pages.' You know, 'I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.' I thought, 'I should write a character like that.'

I felt like I could never write nonfiction, because I would have to spend so many pages explaining my ethnic background, and that wasn't really the story that I ever was interested in telling.

I went to Aspen right after school and got a freelance gig writing articles for the 'Aspen Times.' I was their nightlife correspondent. They paid me fifty bucks an article.

If I got paid, it was no more than five dollars a column, and I still think I was overpaid.